No Other Way
by greymcdreamysgh
Summary: MerDer, more future than pure AU. A slightly angsty oneshot about married life, might continue later. More from Derek's POV than Meredith's. What do they talk about when they're both oncall all night in the hospital? What do they want?


**Disclaimer: **Don't own the show or the characters, Shonda does. Don't make any money off them, the Grey's people do. 

**Summary/Author's Note: **It's Mer/Der, most likely a one-shot but we'll see, more future-oriented than a pure AU. They're married, and you can assume that the story progressed as Shonda has written it thus far, but we're just fastforwarding a couple years and skipping all the delicious things she's probably going to come up with. Anyway, it's a little angsty, but I hope you enjoy and thanks for reading! (I live for feedback; yes, this is a shameless plea.)

_When your mind is a mess, so is mine  
I cant sleep cause it hurts when I think  
My thoughts aren't at peace  
With the plans that we make, chances we take  
And know that if I knew  
All of the answers I would  
Not hold them from you'd  
Know all the things that I'd know  
We told each other, there is no other way_

_- "No Other Way," Jack Johnson  
_

Though it rained almost more often than not in this city, in a hospital as large as Seattle Grace, one could completely miss day-long downpours if one happened to be a surgeon. Derek Shepherd hadn't noticed this particular storm outside until he stopped for a coffee refuel in the late evening one autumn Thursday. It had been a busy day, with his one scheduled craniotomy pushed back until the next day to make room for six emergency surgeries, two of which were neuro, resulting from a school bus accident that morning.

The day had easily gotten away from him, he thought, taking a sip of his coffee before cracking his knuckles, smiling to himself that there had been no fatalities on his watch today. In his head, he started to go over his schedule for the night. He was on-call, but hopefully he'd be able to squeeze in a few hours of sleep after checking on his post-op patients, barring any incoming traumas. Finishing up his drink, he tossed the cup in the trashcan. When he quickly glanced at his pager to check the time, he realized he hadn't seen his wife since he left the house that morning, already over 16 hours ago.

"Dr. Stevens," he called, spotting a tall woman with messy blonde hair juggling several charts and heading for the elevator. "Izzie," he tried again, jogging a little to meet her at the elevator.

"Oh hi, Dr. Shepherd, what can I do for you?" she asked.

"I was just wondering if you had any idea where my wife was," he said. "With that accident this morning, I haven't been able to catch up with her all day."

"No," Izzie said apologetically, "I actually haven't seen her much today myself. I checked the board a minute ago and she was scrubbed in with Bailey on a bowel obstruction. She should be almost done though. I have to check on a few patients before I leave, but if I see her, should I tell her to page you?" she asked.

"Yeah, that'd be great," Derek replied. "Thanks."

"No problem," she smiled, stepping onto the elevator as the doors opened.

"Izzie?" Derek quickly tried again.

"Yes?" she replied as she held her finger on the elevator's open door button.

"Did she seem ok when you saw her today? I mean, from what you could tell?"

"I think so," Izzie said. "I mean she seemed fine when I saw her this morning. I missed her at lunch this afternoon with all those trauma cases, but from what I could tell, Derek, yeah."

"She seemed fine," Derek said softly.

"Why? Is everything ok?" Izzie asked, sudden concern crossing her face.

"Oh…yeah, everything's fine," Derek assured her. "If you see Meredith though, let her know I was looking for her."

"Sure, Dr. Shepherd," Izzie replied smiled before the elevator doors closed.

---------------------------

Derek made his way back over to the nurses' station, picking up one of his patients' charts and absentmindedly thumbing through it while he decided where to go next. He glanced up after a few minutes, and caught sight of Meredith, her tangle of dirty blonde hair still tied up in a scrub cap and her long sleeves pushed up to her elbows under her scrubs. He put the chart back where he found it and went to catch up to her quick stride.

"Meredith," he said softly, reaching for her arm.

At the sound of his voice and the feel of his fingertips on her arm, she turned around. "Hey," she said, smiling when she saw his face.

They stopped in the middle of the hallway, letting the hospital's evening traffic simply move around them. "How was your day?" he asked. "I didn't get to see you at all."

"I know, that accident this morning was awful," she said. "You know how it is, when something like that happens, the day just gets so long. Today was ok, I scrubbed in one of the bus cases. Little six-year-old boy had some crush injuries to the chest and abdomen; he came in with some pretty bad bleeding, but I think he's gonna pull through. How was your day?"

"Sounds pretty much like yours," Derek said. "Two head injuries from the accident, but both kids should be alright. Craniotomy that was supposed to be at 7 a.m. wound up getting pushed back until tomorrow morning."

"So a long night on-call for you just got even longer," she summed up.

"Pretty much," he agreed, laughing a little. "I've been thinking about you all day. Did you take it yet?"

"No," Meredith replied, shaking her head. "I didn't want to take it and then be distracted all day," she explained. "Or I didn't want to take it and then be thinking about how upset I was all day."

"What if we were happy distracted today?" Derek offered.

"Derek," Meredith began, before he stopped her.

"I think this is it, Mer," he said, smiling widely. "I mean I really think so. This is the month. Why? Don't you?" he asked, disappointment written all over his face as he watched her shake her head no.

"Did you get your period?" he asked quickly.

"No," she admitted. "I just don't think it happened though, Derek. I have a feeling."

"_I _have a feeling," he said. "Come on, let's take a test and see. No harm in that," he continued as cheerfully as he could, but the look on her face spoke of something entirely different.

"I will, Derek, just," she sighed, glancing down at her pager, obnoxiously beeping some urgent message at her. "Just not right now," she finished, already starting to move down the hallway. "When I get a minute. I'm sorry, this guy's coding," she apologized, before disappearing around the corner.

"Ok," he agreed, to no one in particular. He checked on his post-op patients, quickly and deliberately moving from room to room in the recovery wing, trying to force those some troubling thoughts of his mind. Satisfied with the outcomes of his surgeries and how the early stages of recovery were progressing, he headed to one of the on-call rooms to lie down for a catnap. The bunk-beds the hospital provided weren't the best. They actually had a military-like quality to them when Derek thought about it, but he figured that it made sense because he considered residency to be somewhat like boot camp anyway. Curling up on the bottom bunk, he put his pager on the pillow by his ear, just in case, and closed his eyes, but sleep wouldn't come.

He couldn't get the look on Meredith's face just now out of his head. Ten months they'd been trying to get pregnant. Ten months, nothing to show for it, and he could see Meredith's discouragement growing with each passing month. It had taken her over two years after they had gotten married for her to even convince herself that that she could handle the life of a surgeon and the demands of a child; to realize that she wasn't her own mother; to allow herself to believe that she'd be good at this. Now that it wasn't happening, he could see her starting to think that maybe it wasn't supposed to, or that it never would. Meredith had a way of twisting things into a darker place, but he knew as well as she did that they could have already had a baby by now.

What scared him the most though - what really freaked him out, that thing that he thought about only when he was tired and stressed out like this, and couldn't possibly tell Meredith – was that what if this was his fault? For the first few months he didn't worry. He knew it was normal for it not to happen right away. Lots of couples had to try a few times. He knew this, he knew this. But, he thought to himself, before he and Addison started having problems, they tried for a year before deciding that they were starting to get really busy anyway so they might as well wait. Back then, Derek took it as lucky, just God's little way of keeping his life as easy as possible as both of their practices took off. He had rationalized it at the time, telling himself that they'd try again as soon as the time was right. At the time, he didn't know that there wouldn't be a right time for him and Addison again, but as he signed the divorce papers he found himself once again thankful to be childless. Shattering a five-year-old's family would have been too much to bear, and he knew Meredith would have felt the same way.

So maybe now, he thought as he yawned, maybe now this was on him. Maybe there was something wrong. Maybe he just didn't want it enough when he had the chance and this was what he deserved, karma coming back around in a bitter circle. I hope not, I hope not, he repeated to himself softly.

He must have fallen asleep sometime after that, because he felt himself waking up as Meredith crawled into the tiny bed next to him. She wrapped his arms around her waist as she snuggled up against him, her back against his chest. "Meredith?" he asked, lazily kissing down the crook of her neck.

His stomach flip-flopped a little when she turned herself around to look at him, but sank as if a brick had been dropped in his insides when he saw her simply shake her head and pull a little closer to him.

"Hey," he said, rubbing her shoulder. "Are you ok?"

"I'm fine," she said, too quickly for him to believe her for a second.

"Meredith," he began, wrapping his arms around her and drawing her flush against his body. "Next month," he said as he pressed his lips to her forehead, sensing her disappointment. "Are you sure you're not?" he asked, looking into her eyes. He regretted asking as soon as the words left his mouth.

"Derek," she said abruptly, closing her eyes and falling quiet. "I didn't even take a test yet," she finally admitted after a few minutes.

"Look, maybe we should stop doing these early response tests. We can always wait a few days. These aren't that reliable," he suggested.

"Seemed to be right so far," she said bitterly.

"We should just wait a couple days for the regular tests," he said, ignoring her tone. "We don't need to do this right now."

"I'm sorry," she breathed. "I was going to. This morning I was going to, but once that accident came in," she said.

"Things got crazy," he said. "Meredith," he murmured, watching her eyes fill up with tears.

"Not even that," Meredith said. "I could have found five minutes to take a test, but I just didn't want to. I didn't want to be holding a scalpel over some kid thinking about a negative pregnancy test," she sighed. "And if it was positive, I didn't want to have to tell some mother that her six-year-old might die on my table. So I put it off. I just can't look at another negative test, Derek," she said, her voice breaking and a few tears finally spilling over. "How many of these freakin' sticks do I have to pee on to get one to turn blue?"

"I know, Mer. I know you're frustrated, but it's gonna happen, ok? It will. If it's not this month, then next month, or the month after," he said, as much for his own reassurance as for hers. Though they had been disappointed so many times in the past several months, as long as Derek allowed himself to believe that the next month's results would bring them the news they wanted, he could remain optimistic. Now, all of a sudden it felt like do or die time, but he wasn't sure why.

"I can't," Meredith said.

That was why, Derek realized.

"I don't know if I can keep doing this. I want this just as much as you do, but if it…. I mean, what if this is not supposed to happen? You know, sometimes I think that this is stupid for us to even try."

"Why?" he asked, a little surprised to hear her say that.

"I know what my childhood was like, Derek. My dad wasn't around, my mother was at the hospital like a hundred hours a week…I look at my life, and you know what I think about? I think about my first grade play. I was the black cat in our school Halloween play, and remember being so excited about it. My nanny made my costume, and I remember trying it on and showing it to my mother the night before the play, but she must have been going over some notes for one of her surgeries the next day because I just couldn't get her attention. The next day I was up on stage, and all my friends' parents were there, but no one was there to see me. When I asked her where she was later, she said that she was in surgery longer than she thought and I needed to understand. She never apologized, Derek. I think about us trying to get pregnant and sometimes I think we're crazy. Sometimes I think, 'Is it even going to be any different for my baby?' I mean, we have these jobs and…."

"No, Mer. It won't be like that," he cut her off with a kiss. "When this happens for us, and it will," he said emphatically, "We will never let it be like that for our baby. Yeah, we have these jobs," he said, "But we'll be at our kid's play, even if they only have one line. We'll make the time for the little league games and the ballet recitals. We won't not be there," he assured her. "Ok?"

"Ok," she agreed.

"Let's just sleep," he suggested. "We can take a test in the morning, or not, whatever you want."

"Ok," she said again, brushing her lips against his.

They tried to get comfortable on the tiny cot, and wedged themselves so tightly against one another. He intertwined his fingers with hers and kissed her shoulder. "Goodnight," he whispered.

A few minutes later, as soon as Derek had gotten relaxed enough to fall asleep, the tiny room filled with the irritating sound of his pager. "Derek," Meredith mumbled sleepily, "Your pager."

He sighed and reached for it. "Dammit," he muttered, climbing over her, "911 for that bus driver. I gotta go."

"Ok, goodnight," she said, fatigue lacing her every word as she started to fall asleep.

---------------------------

When Derek returned to the on-call room a few hours later, Meredith was nowhere to be found. He checked his pager and, seeing that it was already a little after six, he realized there was no use even lying down again before his 9 o'clock craniotomy. He left in search of coffee, stopping on the balcony to watch the pink of the sunrise for a minute before heading back to the surgical wing to get everything ready for his surgery. Flipping through his patient's chart, he watched his colleagues begin to filter in for the day. He nodded hello at Cristina and Izzie and returned to his reading.

A few minutes later, Meredith rounded the corner, balancing a few charts on her hip. He caught her eye, her unreadable expression breaking his heart. In that moment, he contemplated asking her if she wanted to take a break from this trying thing they were doing. Maybe it was too much pressure, and a month or two away from ovulation strips and pregnancy tests would do them both some good. Maybe stopping for a little while, letting whatever happened happen, would be for the best. Letting nature do its thing seemed suddenly comforting; focusing on the science of conception clearly wasn't working for either of them. He finished up with his chart and dropped it back on the counter, reaching out for Meredith.

"Morning," he said.

"Good morning," she regarded him, sorting through a few charts as she stood next to him. "Did you sleep at all last night, Dr. Shepherd?" she asked, looking up at him.

"As a matter of fact, I didn't," he said with a wry half-smile. "But my guy's still alive so I'll take it," he said. "Why are you calling me Dr. Shepherd?" he asked. "You're either mad at me or you wanna have sex. Hopefully it's the latter," he smirked.

"Yeah, keep dreaming," she laughed, "I got paged like two hours after you did, so you're not the only one on no sleep."

"Can't blame a guy for trying," Derek said cheerfully, happy to see her back to her old self if only for a second. "Hey," he said softly, taking her aside, "Are you ok?"

"I'm fine, Derek," she replied, those two words grating on his heartstrings just a little.

"Ok," he conceded. "We'll talk about it when we get home," he said, more of a question than a statement.

"Yeah," she agreed absentmindedly. "Actually, would you be able to give me a quick consult before your craniotomy?" she asked, holding up the patient's chart.

"Uh," he hesitated as he checked the time again, "Yeah, of course."

He kept an eye on her as they walked towards the elevator, as if he could judge her emotional state just by the way that she walked. All he could tell today was that she was exhausted, which was to be expected after the mass of incoming trauma patients yesterday, who had all pulled through long, grueling surgeries only to code in the middle of the night when their doctors were trying to get a little sleep. As she walked with him, her steps seemed heavy. She ran a hand through her hair and pushed her sleeves up a little bit, offering him a tired smile while they waited for the elevator.

"It shouldn't take that long," she assured him, "But here's the labs I just got back," she said, handing him the chart as they stepped onto the elevator.

He flipped open the chart and quickly scanned the page. "These labs look normal, Meredith. The patient's hCG levels are up, but that's all I see here. Is this patient from the accident yesterday?" he asked.

"No, why?"

"I already operated on the bus driver, who was a man, and he was driving a bus full of elementary school kids. You don't see many pregnant elementary school-aged kids, unless I'm missing something."

"She wasn't in the accident yesterday," she said.

"Oh," he replied. "Well, what did she come in with?" he asked. "This patient doesn't look surgical at all."

"No," she agreed. "The patient presented with anxiety and severe stress."

"That's psych, not surgery," Derek said bluntly. "Who put you on this case? This wasn't what you got paged for last night, was it?"

"No, I didn't get paged for this last night."

"Who ordered the consult?" he asked.

"I just thought it would be beneficial. Just look at the chart," she told him.

"I am looking at the chart, Meredith, but I don't see anything that would warrant potential brain surgery," he said.

"Derek," she tried again, "Look at the patient's chart."

"Meredith, I am looking at a clean bill of health here," he said, reading over the paperwork once again. Platelets and red blood cell count were both within normal range, there was nothing remarkable about the glucose and sodium levels, and the triglyceride levels and cholesterol were perfect. The patient didn't even have a hint of anemia, for gods sake. Except for the elevated hCG levels, the patient was in perfect health, and a surgical consult seemed like a waste of time. He shot Meredith a confused look, but she just smiled at him and shrugged. When he gave the chart one last look, he finally got it. Next to 'Patient Name,' 'Meredith Grey' was typed in small print.

Derek held the chart in one hand, and looked up at her completely dumbfounded. He couldn't help but follow suit when he watched a big, almost deliriously happy, smile cross her features.

"Yeah?" he asked with just a hint of nervousness.

"Yeah," she sighed simply, unable to stop herself from positively beaming now that he knew. "I peed on the stick, but after everything, when it turned blue, I didn't believe it. I just got the bloodwork back about an hour ago."

"God, Mer," he breathed, tears welling up in the corners of his eyes. In one quick motion, he shut the elevator down and wrapped her in his arms. "I am so happy," he said, brushing his lips softly against hers before she reciprocated for something more. Her fingers curled around the hair at the nape of his neck as she drew him in, kissing him with everything she had in her.

"It finally happened," Meredith murmured, as blissfully happy as Derek had ever seen her. "I love you."

"You have no idea," he whispered, brushing a few tears off of her cheeks. "Finally, huh?" he said with a slight laugh as his hands moved down to her waist.

"Yep," she replied, that one syllable full of ecstasy, relief, joy, and gratitude. "We're finally having a baby."


End file.
